My Day With The Pandora (ShenMue)

It is really a privilege and an honor for me to have the opportunity to contribute to the Pandoralive series of My Day With Pandora. Ekianjo contacted me one day and asked whether I would like to write something for the series. At first, I was hesitant to accept this for I always have had troubles and lack of courage to write articles that are longer than five sentences. This was one of the reasons why I chose engineering in school BTW). Anyhow, Ekianjo was kind enough and said he would offer me help in terms of correcting my grammar/spelling/complete-the-sentence/etc., as long as I have something to write about. So I thought to myself What the heck, if I screwed up, it’s Ekianjo’s fault.

[This is a guest post from ShenMue from the Pandora boards]

OK, I guess my day with my Pandora is pretty different from others as the majority of its use is on the move. Well, I work pretty far from home. My Monday-Friday bus ride to work typically takes about two hours… yes, each way, and yes, if traffic permits. So, I can do quite a bit of work work and my own work during this half-a-workday on the bus, if you know what I mean. I used to have a big backpack to carry my bulky company-issued-Dell-windowsed laptop for company work, the DS for my DS work, and the hacked PSP for my Playstation 1 work, and all the wire and cables and chargers and whatnot for these systems. It’s quite a heavy backpack. But thanks to the Pandora, I have been able to chuck that backpack and travel on the light-and-leisure side without compromising any work productivity as well as entertainment activities. So what exactly is my day typically with my Pandora, well, on the bus?

After boarding the bus in the morning, I immediately fire up Jumanji on my Pandora and log onto my company’s Microsoft Outlook Web Access and start checking my work emails. The bus line I use has wifi most of the time. When there’s no wifi or when onboard wifi sucks, I access the internet by tethering my Pandora with my company-issued iPhone 5S via bluetooth. Due to the nature of my work, I have a lots of emails that I need to respond to. Yes, I can do all this with the iPhone, but, for me, it’s just much easier, faster, and hence more productive to use my Pandora for this type of task with Pandora’s physical keyboard.

I do quite a bit of presentations at work, and so LibreOffice is really a nice and necessary addition to the Pandora for me. After checking my emails, I open up LibreOffice Impress, an excellent alternative to MS PowerPoint, and start preparing my presentations. This turns a few heads on the bus as I’m the only person who is using this weird and nerdy device to do work meanwhile everyone else is using modern gadgets. When arrive at the office, I hook up my Pandora to the office TV via TV-Out cable and start presenting away. This always distracts my colleagues every time (which is a good thing) 🙂

I also use quite a bit of MS Excel at work, and again, LibreOffice Calc on Pandora is the perfect substitution for that which I can work with very comfortably on the bus. The cool thing is I can save LibreOffice Calc directly in MS Excel compatible format in case I have to give my work to my colleagues or my boss or anyone who do not use Linux to either view or edit on their Windowzed machine.

Who works in the office environment these days does not use Office? I’m no exception. And again, PtitSeb’s port of LibreOffice Writer comes to my rescue on the Pandora while cruising on the bus.

Well, so much work without entertainment would be tortured right? So I catch some Pokemons with DraStic or kicking some butts in Tekken 3 with PCSX-ReARMed.

When I’m ready to take a nap, I fire up Audacious or DeadBeef and enjoy my favorite songs while the bus is on its way home.

As you can see, my Pandora basically replaced most, if not all, of my daily work activities on the bus in addition to providing me with much more…

So that’s basically my day with my Pandora on the bus as I can’t tell you my day with my Pandora at home :P.

Thanks AndyB911 and ArchiMark for your condolences. Yes it is a long commute but I get paid for those hours so I don’t mind 😀 . I used to work one mile from my house, but that job sucked so I changed to this one and Pandora has really helped me out 😀

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What’s This ?

GiantPockets (Previously Known as Pandoralive.info) is a blog dedicated to the Pocket Linux Handheld computers (such as the Open Pandora and the upcoming DragonBox Pyra, but also non-gaming handhelds like the GPD Pocket). These handhelds can be used for gaming but for a bunch of serious uses as they can run full Linux distributions and are typically equipped with physical keyboards. You will find here news regarding their latest software offering, hardware updates, development stories and testimonies of users.